The Number: $41.8 Million

There may not be any better illustration of the popularity of professional football than the N.F.L. draft, which starts Thursday night. It’s a sporting event only in the loosest sense. Hopeful college players will wait for the commissioner Roger Goodell to call their names. Talking heads will talk. And over six million people will watch on television; the draft now regularly gets higher ratings than actual baseball, basketball, and hockey games. The draft’s appeal is three-pronged: it brings America’s most popular sports, professional and college football, together; it’s held three months after the last N.F.L. game of any importance, when the country misses its favorite sport; and it offers a faint glimmer of hope to the fans of perennially awful teams, which pick at the top of the draft and have the best chance of getting a truly talented player. (It’s no coincidence that the comparatively small Buffalo, New York, metropolitan area is often one of the top television markets for the draft: the Bills haven’t made the playoffs in this millennium.)

And, of course, there’s the unfortunate drama of seeing a player projected to go early tumble down the draft board, and not just because of the cameras closing in on their face to capture the agony of an unexpected wait broadcast on national TV. The college game doesn’t come with a salary, so the draft is a big payday for years of hard work. And even within the thirty-two picks of the first round, there’s a gulf between the money at the top and at the bottom. In 2005, quarterback Aaron Rodgers, one of the best players in the N.F.L. today, fell from an expected number one overall selection all the way to twenty-fourth. He received a $7.7 million contract. The actual number-one pick, Alex Smith, another quarterback, got a $49.5 million deal, $41.8 million higher. Rodgers has vastly outperformed Smith since.

There won’t be any gap so large in this year’s Draft—the current collective-bargaining agreement between the N.F.L.’s owners and its players’union, signed in 2011, established a far more restrictive wage scale for rookies. Nonetheless, someone will be disappointed with their draft position, and there will be a significant amount of money involved.

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